The Los Angeles Times editorial board is arguing for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war, following weeks of fighting after Hamas launched the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel.
The editorial board claimed that it “has become impossible to distinguish between Israel’s decidedly non-surgical operation against Hamas militants in Gaza and the indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians.”
“It is time for a cease-fire,” the board wrote. “It is time for the Biden administration to assert strong and sustained pressure on the government of Benjamin Netanyahu to stop attacks that have reportedly already killed more than 11,000 Gazans. The world cannot stand by to witness more slaughter of civilians.”
“Remaining mindful of America’s mistakes, it is incumbent upon the Biden administration now to avoid complicity with Israel’s,” the board wrote. “We are past the time to excuse the horror in Gaza. Biden has to press Netanyahu hard to stop the mass, indiscriminate killing. That starts with a call for a cease-fire.”
The board conceded that while Hamas is a “radical militant organization” that also is in control of the Gaza government, “Hamas’ atrocities do not justify atrocities in kind.”
The board continued: “Following Hamas’ initial attack, Israel instructed the people of northern Gaza to leave their homes and made no commitment that they would ever be able to return. Israel’s reprisal destroyed homes and cut off power and communications, making it impossible for survivors of the bombing even to search for the remains of family and neighbors beneath the rubble.”
Prominent members of Congress and big-name Democratic politicians are divided on the issue of a cease-fire.
Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., was criticized this week for saying that by calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, he was “uplifting deeply what it actually means to be Jewish.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has also led renewed calls for Biden to support a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas over the “grave violations” being committed against children in the war.
On the other side, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rejected calls for a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war on “The View” in early November, instead throwing her support behind “humanitarian pauses.”
Biden’s press office did not respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
However, not all marketers understand how to implement a content strategy correctly. When you don’t start with the basics, you could be making content production more complicated than necessary.
To be successful, your content plan must be actionable, and you need to publish content consistently.
That’s where an editorial calendar comes in.
We’re going to cover the basics, including how to create and manage your editorial calendar, and how it can help your content strategy grow
4 Reasons to Use an Editorial Calendar
An editorial calendar enables content publishers to plan, create, publish, and promote their content in an organized manner. Many bloggers and businesses use editorial or content calendars to streamline content production.
In many ways, an editorial calendar is a lifesaver for creatives and business owners. Whether you’re a blogger, freelance writer, business owner, or creative director at a marketing firm, an editorial content calendar can help you stay on track and keep you sane—while ensuring a consistent flow of content.
Others use an editorial calendar to improve focus, because an organized approach can also limit writer’s block and keep content evergreen.
There are other ways you can benefit from an editorial content calendar, including:
1. Better Organization and Delegation
With an editorial calendar, you can see articles that need writing at a glance. From there, you can delegate the articles to your writing team, ready for them to get to work. No more scrambling to send writers topics at the last minute or wondering if you’ll even get around to writing this month.
With a calendar, it’s all right in front of you.
Ultimately, this level of organization saves time, keeps the content coming, and ensures every member of your content creation team knows what they’re doing.
2. Improved Planning
The better you plan your articles, the better the writing tends to be. When you know what you want to write, you don’t waste time with last-minute research or trying to find the sources you need to support your article.
In fact, some consider planning to be more important than the content production itself. Planning content is essential for:
Creating the kind of content most suited to your audience.
Writing the in-depth content your audience wants—and needs
Publishing exactly when and where your customers hang out.
3. Helps Achieve Your Goals
Your editorial calendar is part of your content strategy. Ideally, you’ve developed your content strategy around the goals you’re trying to achieve with your product, your blog, or your company overall.
Whatever your goals are for your business, your editorial calendar has a vital role in allowing you to achieve them.
4. Sticking to Deadlines
According to Mark Twain, “deadlines are the greatest source of inspiration.”
However, that doesn’t mean you want to do a rush job.
To avoid rushing content creation, every team member needs to be clear on their deadlines to keep reaching your goals and your audience engaged.
Further, keeping up with these deadlines is especially important when you’re publishing new content that’s a part of your business strategy. For example, if you are publishing blogs to support a new launch or annual sale.
How to Create an Editorial Calendar
Don’t let the thought of creating an editorial calendar stress you out—I promise it’s not that complicated once you create a plan. This next section takes you through how to create an effective calendar, step-by-step. This is just an outline, so feel free to adjust these steps to meet the needs of your business.
1. Determine Which Tools to Use
Your first step is deciding which tools to use. This varies from team to team, and content managers may need a combination of tools for best results.
If you want free options for getting started, Google Docs, Excel, or Trello are popular choices. For paid tools, there are several worth considering, including:
Airtable
Asana
Monday
BrightPod
Airtable, Asana, and HubSpot offer free content calendar templates to get you started, and there are plenty of others available, too.
Whichever tool you use, make sure it meets everyone’s needs. As Buffer’s editorial director, Ash Read, told HubSpot:
“[your] editorial calendar should be a resource for your whole team, not just content creators.”
2. Create a Content Backlog
Next, you need to create a content backlog. This is just a list of content ideas for easy viewing and lets you track your ideas for posts.
You could use Google Sheets or Excel for this, or one of the free templates mentioned, like Asana.
Whichever you go with, your chosen tool should allow you to create a clear, organized list. Just remember, it’s OK to stray from your list. Not every idea will end up as an entire post, and sometimes changing your content strategy is essential for keeping up with new trends or thinking of a new angle.
Create your sheet, then start adding a few headings like:
title
assigned author
project status
publication date
Other headings you could use are:
Special dates and anniversaries.
Themes and distribution channels.
Trending topics/new launches relevant to your niche.
Seasonal content and key sales dates. For instance, Black Friday, where you may want to ramp up content production.
3. Develop Your Content Strategy
Don’t overthink your content strategy. There’s a simple way of making sure your content strategy covers all the bases, and as long as you keep these parts in mind, you won’t go wrong.
First, outline steps such as how much content you want to produce a month, what topics you want to cover, and your ideal customers.
Then add strategic steps, such as managing your existing content and goal tracking. These might include:
Define your goals: For example, growing your mailing list or attracting new customers.
Understand your customers: Which social media sites do your audience use? Which content types do they prefer/respond to? What are their pain points, and how can your products/services solve them?
Analyze your competition: You can use a tool like Ubersuggest, which has a free and paid version to see which keywords competitors are targeting.
Positioning: What makes your business unique, and how do you stand out in your marketplace? You could do this in a few ways, like specializing in a targeted niche or telling your brand’s story. Ask yourself how the content you’re creating can achieve this.
Estimate your budget: How much is your content strategy going to cost you, and how can you maximize your ROI?
Measure your KPIs so you know your content is getting results: For example, if you’re aiming to build brand awareness, an increase in shares and views will show you’re heading in the right direction.
4. Schedule the First Month
Many of us produce content at the last minute or create it whenever we have spare time. If you’re looking for a less stressful (and more effective) approach, schedule your content in advance.
A month is usually enough, but you could schedule up to six weeks. You can use Google Calendar for this.
Add each step of your process, and make sure to give yourself plenty of time. So, you might create a due date on the first Monday to write your outlines, then schedule one article a week to be written, two days for editing, set a publish date, then schedule it into your social media sharing calendar.
The process will vary based on how much content you produce and how many people are on your team, but I strongly recommend breaking each piece of content into more manageable steps.
5. Move Articles Into Production
When you’re in the full swing of producing content, it’s easy to let pieces slip through the cracks, especially if you have multiple people working on the project. Creating a Trello account can keep you on track.
The first step in using your Trello account for content production is to decide what stages each article will need to go through.
What you need is up to you, but here are some suggestions for your Trello cards:
assign to writer
writing in progress
ready for edits
ready for uploading and scheduling
Alternatively, you could make it more complex and add additional steps like:
If you’re just starting with an editorial calendar, you need to get a few articles ready for publication.
Choose a schedule that suits you, but a forward-looking schedule of 4-6 weeks works well for most teams.
That sounds like a lot of work, but you can approach the task in two ways. First, you could spend a few weeks writing content until you have a volume of work to publish. However, this method isn’t suitable for everyone, unless you’ve got a team of writers to help you.
Another way is to spend a few months creating extra content every day, which is doable for most content producers.
7. Continually Optimize Your Process
So far, we’ve covered how to get your content production off the ground. However, you can’t set it and forget it. Over time, you might find there are bottlenecks in your process or that certain tools don’t fit your needs. Make sure to check in with your team regularly to ensure the editorial process you’ve created is working for everyone.
Common areas to review include:
your schedule and the tools you’re using
the volume of content you’re storing
the time between stages
the metrics you track
Over time, you’ll get a better understanding of whether the tools you’re working at are suitable for your team and whether the amount of articles you’re publishing is helping your business grow.
FAQs About Editorial Calendars
Why do I need an editorial calendar?
An organized approach to content production reduces time and helps you publish better quality content. From ideation and writing to publishing and promotion, an editorial calendar helps streamline every part of the process.
Do I need paid tools to create an editorial calendar?
Not unless you want to. Free tools like Trello and Google Docs are fine, but there are also paid options like Asana available.
What headings should I include on an editorial calendar?
Not everyone’s calendar looks the same, but most marketers include titles, publication dates, and the article writer’s name. Once you’ve added in the most obvious headings, write in the titles that work for your specific needs.
What’s the difference between an editorial calendar and a content calendar?
These terms are often used interchangeably. However, an editorial calendar generally outlines each step of the process, while a content calendar usually covers one aspect—such as when posts are published or shared to social media.
Summary of Editorial Calendar Guide
An editorial content calendar is a must-have for any content marketer or small business looking to make the most of content production. It helps you stay focused on your goals and produce high-quality content consistently.
Although it sounds like a lot of work, setting up a calendar isn’t difficult and allows you to seamlessly produce evergreen content while making the most of seasonal trends.
How do you use an editorial calendar? Tell us below.
As a digital marketer, you know just how important the tone and message of your blog are to the overall success of your business. A cohesive approach to your digital content, especially the content on your blog, is critical to your brand.
The best way to ensure your site is editorially cohesive is with an editorial style guide.
This article will walk you through the basics of an editorial style guide. You’ll learn the steps you need to follow to create your own style guide whether from scratch, with the use of a template, or with help from a freelancer.
What is an Editorial Style Guide?
An editorial style guide is a set of guidelines for the writers and editors on your team. These guidelines will include standards for grammar, spelling, sentence structure, and image use.
The goal of a style guide is to ensure your content stays consistent and high quality no matter who is writing or editing the article.
Why Does Your Website Need an Editorial Style Guide?
More than just a preferred list of grammar rules, an editorial style guide provides your content team with guidelines for the creation of useful, on-brand content. An editorial style guide ensures a standard baseline for quality and consistency. This will become more critical as your in-house editorial team grows.
Perhaps you think your website is too small, or you can always create your content now and flesh out the details later. The truth is, the sooner you can get your editorial style and processes nailed down, the less work for you and your team.
Without clear guidelines in place, your inbox will soon be flooded with questions from your writers and editorial staff. Your editorial staff may think that lack of guidelines gives them free reign over content. This may result in inconsistent and maybe even poor quality work that has your brand name all over it.
Elements of a Style Guide
There are specific elements all style guides should include, such as:
Grammar
Do you expect your writers to use the Oxford comma? Are there instances where you prefer the semicolon over the em-dash? These are the grammatical rules to call out in your style guide.
Other grammatical elements to take a stand on include where punctuation falls in relation to quotation marks (inside or outside), prepositions at the end of a sentence, and starting sentences with conjunctions.
Spelling
A subscription to services like Grammarly takes care of the majority of misspellings. There may be times where a word can be spelled correctly in two or more ways, so which one should your writers choose?
The most common spelling differences are those with American English versus British English variations. Examples include:
Center vs. centre
Theater vs. theatre
Color vs. colour
Criticize vs. criticise
Program vs. programme
You should consider where the majority of your audience lives when deciding on a spelling “style.” But the most important thing is to choose one style and be consistent.
Voice and Tone
The voice is the overall expression of your brand, while the tone is how that message is delivered. The tone will vary depending on the medium (e.g. social media post, blog post, newsletter, press release), but the overall brand voice will be your writers’ guiding light.
Is your brand voice considerate and simple like Uber or functional and expressive like Starbucks? Once you have found your brand voice’s sweet spot, it’s time to determine what your tone is and when that may change depending on the medium or circumstances. Perhaps your tone is casual and conversational in blog posts, but witty in social media posts.
You’ll want to include relevant examples here as Uber does in the Applications section of their style guide. These will help to solidify your stance while also giving your writers a handy guide to refer to should they need it.
Sentence and Paragraph Length
From witty one-liners to groupings of five to six sentences, there are many valid ways to form a paragraph. Here you want to outline your general preference and when exceptions should be made.
On academic websites, for example, longer sentences and paragraphs are the norm. This is because there is a lot of high-level information that needs to be delivered at once. On recipe or hobby blogs, however, shorter sentences and paragraphs can help to drive a point home.
Links
This section of your style guide should discuss how links on your blog should be formatted, but also how often to use links and to where (e.g. external versus internal content).
If you’re a medical or academic marketer, for example, you may require that links to outside sources meet a minimum quality standard. If that’s the case, you should provide explicit examples of websites and sources that you trust.
Resources
Your editorial style guide should be in-depth, but if it’s too long it can be difficult for your writers and editors to use effectively. One way to reduce your style guide’s length without compromising content is with resources.
The resource section of your style guide should include links to guides that you have properly vetted. These may include:
Academic style guides (e.g. APA or MLA)
Grammatical rules and guidelines
How-to guides and documentation for platforms your writers and editors will use
Database links
You want to set up your writers to be self-sufficient. An expansive resource section within your editorial style guide is a great place to start.
Images and Other Media in an Editorial Style Guide
If you encourage the use of images and other media in your website content, you’ll need to be explicit about formatting, attribution, content, and more. What do these elements cover?
Formatting:Specify minimum and maximum dimensions, image size requirements, and placement within an article
Attribution: Outline your expectations for how your writers should attribute content to the creator. This will vary depending on the copyright license, but compliance with copyright laws is a must.
Content: You should call out any limitations or restrictions you have on certain activities within imagery, such as drinking alcohol. Or maybe you have a style preference for feature images, such as overlay shots. This information is useful for your writers and editors.
There are very real potential consequences to improperly attributed imagery, so this part of your style guide should be very specific. It’s best to provide examples and even templates for your writers and editors to use.
Creating Your Editorial Style Guide
Now you’re ready to create your own style guide. Where should you begin?
Before you become overwhelmed with the process, let’s discuss three ways you can go about creating your own style guide.
Hiring a Freelancer to Create Your Editorial Style Guide
You can hire a freelancer for just about any blog or website-related task, so why not consider hiring a freelancer to create your style guide? Freelancers with experience in writing industry-specific content, including style guides, do exist. If you can find a freelancer with experience creating a style guide in your field, then even better!
There are various freelance recruitment platforms, such as Freelancer and Upwork. You can also reach out to your personal and professional network for recommendations.
An experienced freelancer can walk you through the process of editorial style guide creation. You should come to the table with some information prepared, though. For example:
Brand voice and tone (Casual? Authoritative? Academic?)
Your preference for tense and point of view
Any strong preferences you have (e.g. oxford comma, text formatting, image formatting)
Industry or company requirements
You hired the freelancer for their knowledge and expertise, so don’t forget to utilize it. If your freelancer has created an editorial style guide in your niche, then ask them for recommendations based on their previous work.
You may be surprised at the sections you didn’t even think to add, and others that you can cut. Using this previous experience can boost the quality of your style guide and prevent issues caused by ambiguity.
Creating an Editorial Style Guide From a Template
If a freelancer isn’t in your budget, you don’t have to go it alone. There are many style guide templates available for you to work with.
The best place to look for such templates is on marketing, branding, and design blogs.
TechWhirl offers a Word document template for download, and Lucidpress has its own template you can customize using their online editor. You may also have luck with template repositories like this one from Microsoft.
The important thing to remember is a template is a guide, not a rule book. You don’t need to include all of its sections, and you’re free to add any sections you feel necessary.
Creating Your Own Editorial Style Guide
If you prefer to create your own style guide from scratch, then consider the step-by-step process outlined below.
Start With a Solid Base
At this stage, it’s time to choose an established style guide as your base.
There are plenty of options as described below, including APA and MLA. By choosing one of these guides as your baseline, you make it easy to create the foundation of your style guide.
These established guides already include rules on grammar, structure, and formatting. You can then build upon those rules to create a robust editorial style guide for your website.
Establish Brand Voice and Set the Tone
Two critical elements of marketing content are often overlooked: brand voice, and tone. The reason these are so often overlooked isn’t because they’re unimportant, but because they can be difficult to distinguish.
Skittles, for example, has a playful and upbeat voice. Their marketing campaigns are slightly fantastical with an eye towards bright colors, loud sounds, and catchy quips.
The tone is the inflection on your brand voice that will change depending on the situation. Even if you have an army of writers, you can ensure your blog stays cohesive by setting a tone for your writers and editors to abide by.
Remember the Big Three: Tense, Voice, and Point of View
Now you know the tone of your content, it’s time to outline the “how-to.” How do you intend for your writers to speak to your audience? The answer will depend on the tense, voice, and point of view you prefer.
Writing tense refers to the three tenses: past, present, and future.
There may be reasons all three tenses are used on your website or blog. You should still pick a dominant tense for your writers to defer to in most circumstances.
Voice refers to active voice versus passive voice. That means putting the subject first (active) or putting the object first (passive). Active voice is the standard for most bloggers and marketers. It offers a more conversational tone readers find compelling.
Point of viewrefers to the perspective of the writer: first, second, or third person.
Bloggers and marketers will typically utilize first person (“I” statements) or second person (“You” statements). The point of view you choose will depend largely on your content niche and your overall tone.
It’s best to have a default recommendation for all three of the above. You may include exceptions to the rule, but be sure to provide specific examples if you do so.
Establish Standard Formatting
The way your content flows is largely dependent on its formatting. Some basic formatting guidelines to consider are headers and subheaders, bold and italic text, and hyperlinking text.
You may want to consider your content management system and any potential limitations when it comes to header tag guidelines.
If you are heavily relying on a style guide such as the APA, you can utilize their recommendations for text formatting. For example, italicizing terms that have a technical or special meaning.
Define Image Requirements
There are many good reasons to include imagery on your website. However, images can take up precious space, and they come with their own copyright risks. This is why you must define image requirements within your style guide.
On the technical side, you should define minimum and maximum image size. This will largely depend on your content platform, and it may vary by image type (featured image versus in-content image). With copyright infringement always being a risk, you also want to provide strict requirements when it comes to including images in content.
If you use a premium image repository, like Shutterstock, you may include account login details in this part of your style guide. You can also link to free image repositories such as Unsplash or Pexels.
Beyond that, you should clearly outline (with examples) the desired format for image references. What should be included, and how should it be formatted? Again, it may be helpful to fall back on your chosen style guide’s standard.
Incorporate Standards of Performance
How will your writers know when they hit the nail on the head or, conversely, miss the mark? This is where standards of performance come in handy.
Standards of performance are guidelines that your writers and editors can refer to when evaluating their content piece. The more objective your standards of performance, the better.
When it comes to establishing standards of performance, it helps to think of a grading rubric. For each standard, it’s possible to score anywhere from one to five points. What standards can you choose that will be easy to evaluate on a five-point scale? A few examples include:
The standards of performance will be beneficial to your writers, as well as your editorial staff.
Picking a Preexisting Editorial Style Guide as a Base
The likelihood is something will inadvertently be left out of your editorial style guide. This is why having a default style guide for your writers and editors to refer to is crucial.
These style guides have typical use cases, though they can be adapted for uses beyond the norm. Let’s look at the four most common style guides.
Associated Press (AP)
The Associated Press (AP) style guide is most commonly used by journalists. Its focus is on disseminating information clearly with simple formatting.
American Psychological Association (APA)
The American Psychological Association (APA) style guide is most commonly used in college in science and social science courses. It has a slightly more formal bent than the MLA, though not so formal as the Chicago Manual of Style.
This style guide is ideal for academic writing, including blogs or websites dedicated to discussing academic subjects.
Modern Language Association (MLA)
The Modern Language Association (MLA) style guide is most commonly used in college-level English courses, and it’s also the default for many bloggers, marketers, and content writers. This guide offers a more laid-back approach desirable to writers, editors, and readers alike.
Chicago Manual of Style
The Chicago Manual of Style is the most rigorous of the style guides. This style guide isn’t a popular choice for most bloggers due to its meticulous nature.
The key differences between the four style guides are largely related to formatting, though there are some grammatical and structural variations as well. There isn’t one style guide better than the other as they all have their strengths and weaknesses. The guide you choose will depend largely on preference, ease of use, and familiarity.
Picking a Platform to Host Your Editorial Style Guide
You’re ready to create your style guide, but where should you host it? You have a few options, and they each have their pros and cons.
Microsoft Word
A word documentis perhaps the simplest option. The most obvious limitation of word documents is the inability to automatically update the guidelines. You would need to send the updated document out to all writers and editors as additions or changes are made.
Google Docs
If you like the idea of a simple document, then consider Google Docs. You will still have access to the basic content tools offered by a word document, but updates will be reflected live. You can also collaborate with members of your editorial team.
Sharepoint
Perhaps you want a more secure platform than Google. If that’s the case, then Sharepoint may be for you. Sharepoint is compatible with the Microsoft Suite, including Word. Using Sharepoint, you can upload an already existing Word document or create your own within the platform.
Just like Google Docs, your changes are reflected immediately and you can collaborate with as many team members as needed.
Confluence
If more robust collaboration is needed, especially when you’re just beginning to create your editorial style guide, you may prefer a platform like Confluence. This is a wiki-style platform that enables you to create your style guide with your team.
Resources to Create a Quality Editorial Style Guide
As you create your style guide, you’ll find yourself going down many rabbit holes. With this in mind, we’ve compiled a list of helpful resources to get you started on your research.
To familiarize yourself with institutional style guides, check out these resources on the AP, APA, MLA, and Chicago Manual of Style style guides.
Are you finding yourself needing some inspiration? Take a look at the style guides created by institutions like Princeton and Rutgers. Your favorite companies and brands may also have their style guides publicly available, including Mailchimp, Google, and Atlassian.
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